22 TVBEurope The Business Case


www.tvbeurope.com May 2012


“Fasp has to be as gracious on the network as TCP”


Michelle Munson: “What fasp is never existed before.


We had enough experience to know how to do it – just enough experience”


“The fundamental problem involves getting media files — as big as they are — to and from the Cloud. We have built applications to link to and from Amazon’s platform, for example.” She also makes the point that the lessons learnt in the media business are now being applied in other areas. “The media business is the most mature at the moment,” she says, “so we are seeing the fastest growth in other markets where there are emerging big data applications. “In life sciences, applications


Moving fasp media


Realising TCP was an inefficient way of handling large high-speed data transfers, Aspera President, CEO and Co-Founder Michelle Munson decided to design a more efficient engine. Dick Hobbs talks to her about its fasp technology in the entertainment & media sectors


OUR INDUSTRY is sometimes criticised for still being engineering-focused, but it is actually relatively rare for a successful business today to be run by the technical brains that founded it. Aspera, which specialises in high-speed data transfer technology, is a notable exception. Michelle Munson was — and is — an exceptionally bright software engineer. She was the youngest ever engineering alumni fellow at Kansas State University and a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, before getting immersed in application level networking in Silicon Valley. With a colleague, Serban Simu, she became engaged with the problem of moving large amounts of data around. This was a decade ago, when the internet was firmly established and it was clear that TCP was an inefficient way of handling large data transfers. “This was a growing,


unsolved problem, and I became intellectually engaged in it,” Munson says. “With Serban, we wanted to see if we could design a new machine in software. We looked at all the acceleration solutions then available, to see where they broke down.


“We were looking for something


that would be effectively infinitely scalable on a standard computer,” she continues. “For nine months of my life all I did was spec the market and, ultimately, design this new engine.” That technological development became fasp, the product which still underpins everything Aspera does today. Its introduction was timely, because it came at the point when both the internet and


its first media client — carrying digital dailies between Australia and Los Angeles — and it has not looked back. Today the idea of moving content as files is absolutely central to the way we plan workflows, and our expectations of commoditised transport continue to grow. Sky Deutschland, for example, implemented an automated ingest system connecting it to


like Sky, are looking for maximum efficiency of course, but not at the expense of reliability. It also has to be scalable, and to play nicely with other traffic on the infrastructure. “One of the things we do that is unique in the world has to do with bandwidth control,” she said. “We offer 1000-fold scaling, from kilobits to gigabits, and sharing traffic across this scale is a long-running dimension of our development. Fasp has to


“People are taking media workflows and re-purposing them. The broadcast industry should feel proud that its file-based handling is leading other industries”


the digital content market had reached the right state of maturity, but that does not take away from the revolutionary nature of the solution. “What fasp is never existed before,” according to Munson. “We had enough experience to know how to do it – just enough experience!”


1000-fold scaling The first user of fasp was actually a defence contractor, but at NAB in 2004 Aspera won


global content suppliers as well as its own newsgathering teams. It uses Aspera fasp. Speaking of the solution,


Francesco Donato, vice president of broadcast operations at Sky Deutschland, says “we set out to implement high performance, automated media ingest, delivery and distribution workflows.” Reflecting this, Munson


explains that the challenges continue to grow. Broadcasters,


be as gracious on the network as TCP.” As Donato of Sky Deutschland suggests, the reach of Aspera has extended from pure transport into the storage of the data. As well as managing the transfer, the software can also manage data congestion on RAID servers at the destination. The company is also looking at cloud-based solutions. “The Cloud is becoming real for digital media,” Munson says.


like the human genome involve huge amounts of data,” she quotes as an example, continuing “Fortune 500 companies need to manage disaster recovery plans, and there is a huge growth in digital media content in other businesses. “People are taking media


workflows and re-purposing them. The broadcast industry should feel proud that its file-based handling is leading other industries.”


Friction-free capacity Today Aspera employs around 100 people, with R&D still in Silicon Valley but with sales offices around the world. Fasp remains at the core of the offering, available as shrink-wrapped software for point-to-point connections, as an SDK for larger implementations or with Aspera developing solutions. Asked to point to the critical issues facing the company today, Munson talks about workflow as the central point. “We have to ensure interoperability with other systems, and we have to provide friction-free capacity for large file transfers. That means we have to address capacity, of course, but we also have to orchestrate workflows so that the content has somewhere to go. “It is also important that we


provide pervasive access for ad hoc file transfers,” she adds. Delivering content from anywhere to anywhere, not just from fixed locations, is seen as an imperative. The ability to build a fasp appliance on a standard computer connected to any viable broadband circuit is critical to this goal — you can download a free desktop client from asperasoft.com. “Our goal is to meet the fundamental needs of broadcasters in this file-based time,” she concludes. “That means friction-free workflows, interoperability and ad hoc access with speed and scale.”


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